A Late Minoan III ‘kitchen’ at Makritikhos (Knossos) (Knossos Survey 90)

In the summer of 1951 N. Dadoudis, while digging a deep trench to bury stones from a plot of land belonging to him on the east edge of Makritikhos village, about 250 metres north of the Palace of Minos, found a complete Minoan amphora (Plan, Fig. 5, no. 3). He reported this discovery to the Ephor of Antiquities for Crete, Dr. N. Platon, who invited Piet de Jong, then the School's Curator at Knossos, to examine the area. Excavation revealed a small room, against the east wall of which the amphora had evidently once stood. The room was cleared by Piet de Jong assisted later by Sinclair Hood. To judge from the character of the vases found in it, the room might have been used as a kitchen.The ground on the edge of Makritikhos village here slopes steeply down through a series of terraces to the bed of the Kairatos stream about 40 metres to the east. The ‘Kitchen’ lay just below a high bank, forming the western boundary of the plot of ground, with the natural rock exposed at the north end and Minoan house walls showing in it to the south. There seems to have been a marked slope down towards the north as well as to the east here in Minoan times. The wall a–a (Fig. 2) at the north end of the original trench dug by Dadoudis, of squared limestone blocks measuring up to about half a metre in length and 0–35 thick, lay at a lower level than the Kitchen, although it appeared to be of the same period with it. A roughly constructed wall b–b south of a–a may have supported a terrace marking this change in ground level. The corner d–d of another, presumably contemporary, house built of squared limestone blocks was exposed in the south part of the original trench.